IN WOUNDED FIELDS

 
IN WOUNDED FIELDS


Prologue
We wander down the subterranean shaftIn which the museum at Albert, Picardy,Conceals from this town’s normal life The bloody, muddy face Of World War One,The stinking trenches And all the wounded fields.And you can hear the dying;.Taste the death down here;In our strange silence I do not want to stayWhere no words comeBut find I cannot quickly take myself away....
In the souvenir shop on the way out Of the brick-arch tunnel, cold stone floor,Before reaching the fresh air of the townWe look in silence stillThrough sickly memorabiliaAnd at the history books:And from a nice French lady buy oneCalled;“Violets from Oversea;”By Toni and Valmai Holt(Illustrations Charlotte Zeepvat) That tells how from chaos flowered poesy,Avoids the use of the word ‘hero,’Of poets speaks without hypocricy.
And outside in the thin October rainAs I look high up to the golden virgin, Child in her outstretched hands, against grey sky, That surmounts the Town Hall (Known to the soldiers as The Angel of Albert,)And later, reading of those soldier poets - I know I have to say some thing.To some of them, anyway. 
Bryan IslipOctober 96
Note: Words italicised throughout In Wounded Fields are those of the subject poet.

To Charles Hamilton Sorley; 19 May 1895 - 28 April 1915

Hello pale youth, lip touched with thin moustache,Captain, D Company, Suffolk Regiment,Cross-Wiltshire running old Marlburian:At you fast sped the unkind spinning lead  At Loos to drill your helmet, still so new.How all too true your words of how...“Earth...            Shall rejoice and blossom too            When the bullet reaches you.”
Wherever did you stow your socialism, Your bitter sense of anti-Kiplingism?When you packed up your old kit-bag, and whereYour liking for Goethe & Rilke, Ibsen?(Not for Hardy, your love of him had lapsed)Your marchers...”All the hills and vales along...            The singers are the chaps            Who are going to die perhaps.”
But listen, you could have been one of those Pieces of living pulp  you so dreaded havingTo carry back across that no-man’s waste:Or one of those with you at Ypres who Had breathed deep of the gently shifting breeze,Blinked, blinded by its gift of British gas,Coughed out their sightless time in yellow pus.
You could have been...have been the dramatist,The best, John Masefield, Poet Laureate said,Since that Stratfordian, if you had lived.“I am giving my body,” you wrote, (I think He’d like your shocking words,) “To fight againstThe most enterprising nation in the world”But Charles how straight you stood, your flag unfurled!
Sighing, you folded; sank spent-muscled downInto that slime and no-one said soft things:No bands of angels took thee to thy rest.They never found you, Captain Sorley, did they?Though lost you not for minds cannot decay,And you would know, sweet twenty, soldier prince,It matters not in what dark earth you lay...
...And after in your muddy kitbag thereThey found your cry against what Brooke had said:Your cry; “Say only this; that they are dead.”****            To: Leslie Coulson      July 1889  -  October 1916

“Who spake the Law that men should die in meadows?”You ask and I reply, ‘Man spake that Law,’(Though in regards to other than himself;)And in pursuance since the dawn of human Kind has killed and died in meadows, townsUpon the seas and hills, now in the air And after questioned why, and was it fair.Why? But no-one knows - and fair? Who is to care?
“Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?”You ask and I reply, ‘You spake that word,You, Sergeant, for by just being there -Proud member of the London RegimentRetreating last from lost Gallipoli- With all those men, some khaki some in greyWho’ll fight until one colour wins the day‘Till thick in lanes the dead, the dying lay.
“Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?”You ask and I say it was ever thus,Beneath the beauty always lie the bonesThat nourish it, upon which it must feedAs feeds nobility in war upon the lost, The crying of the dead, the awful dying:You who vainly fought, near Albert lying,Your bones now ‘neath the nodding flowers, sighing.
“Who spread the hills with flesh and blood and brains?”You ask and know the answer: it is youWho trained your smoking gun upon the foe,Who covered hills with screaming shot and shellTo deaden all that runs or flies or grows.For more than this ask your creator God,Your fingers stiffly clawed into the sod, ‘Till agony is spent with all your blood.
‘All the blood that war has ever strewn is But a passing stain,’ you wrote... before the start...

*****
To Francis Ledwidge      August 1887  - July 1917

Did you still, “Hear roads calling and the hills And the rivers, wondering where I am,”At Hellfire Corner, sitting drinking teaAs arced unseen that deadly mortar bombWhich was to end an Irish poet’s dream?
A long way sure, from Owen, Brooke, and thoseSmart young men in smarter khaki clothesWho never mended any metalled roadYet were your brothers of the silken verseAnd knew as well as you the smell of death.I wonder what became of all your clan(Nine children to evicted farming man:)Perhaps your father was a dreamer too,Dreaming,“Songs of the fields,” just as you,His Celtic longing more than mind can bear.But what genetic streak of ancient GaelGave will to write and sensitivityTo know; “And greater than a poet’s fameA little grave that has no name;”  tell me,You school-less twelve year old adrift, tell me, Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge, fighting man,Sometime Slane Corps of Irish NationalistsNow Inniskilling Fusiliers, enrolled To kill the foe of She who’s not your friendAnd fight for her through hell’s Gallipoli.And how, I wondered, could a poet write In winter trenches on the brutal SommeOf lilting “Fairy Music” (“Ceol Sidhe”)?Was still the barred cuckoo so real to you,In Crocknahara meadows by the Boyne?
Always you yearned for mother, Ireland,“The fields that call across the world to me,”And now near where the spires of Ypers stand You dream your dreams, denied reality, Beneath your wild flowers ‘till the end.

****
To Roland Aubrey Leighton: March 1895 - December 1915

We searched the lanes, found you in Louvencourt’sSmall cemetry amidst a company Of stones standing straight-rowed to attention, Smart white in a slow rain, near where you died; ‘Lieutenant R A Leighton 7th Worcesters,’Says your monument; said that telegram.“I walk alone although the way is long,”You said, in private lines in your black book,“And with gaunt briars and nettles overgrown;”What pain you meant by this we’ll never know. Just such a light so bright as yours alignsThe many-splendoured ones on which it shines.
She capitalised your ‘Him’ as godheads doWhenever afterwards she wrote of you.
Yes, “Life is love and love is you, dear, you”You wrote, prize scholar bursting sweating out Of your illicit wet night dreams of she,Who’d written to herself ;’Impressive, he,Of powerful frame, pale face and stiff thick hair.’Would you we know had she not loved you so?Dee likes to know you in those violets,Pressed brown and withered, desiccated now,You sent to Vee from shattered 'Plug Street' Wood,Picked from red sticky ground around the head,The horrid face and splintered skull that sheMust never see?... She, Vera of the V A D?
Who, from your sceptic pact with her enticedYour secret taking of Rome’s hand of Christ?  And I, not knowing of you very much,Looked in that brass bound book at LouvencourtRead this year’s batch of private messagesTo you, young friend, mostly from those unborn When that one, shiv’ring in his field grey,Unsurprised to see you that cold night, glad Of the Christmas gift, squeezed the steel trigger,Exploding pain into your youthful frame...From far and wide they’d come to speak their grief,So many words to you who wrote so few.Why stood you there, why dare the guns, Roland?‘Hinc illae lacrimae;’* your code...I still don’t understand....            * Hence those tears’ ....   (Terence)

****
To: John McRae: November 1872 - January 1918

Youth steals away from all who live, McRae,Though weary not the sons the Highlands yields, Canadian now (except on Empire Day,)You’re ‘uncle’ to the boys in Flanders’ fields. You wrote;“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow;”And midst the dogs of war you heard the lark,Went on; “We shall not sleep, though poppies grow,”(If generations new allow the dark.)They say you wrote it by first morning lightOne bloody Ypres day in May, ‘15,As German chlorine robbed men of their sight,Oh, few men see what you, Doctor, have seen -Seen six out of each ten CanadiansSans life sans love sans laughter; sans all sans...
Did you, Lieutenant Colonel John McRae,Veteran of Boer war, Loos and Passchendaele,For them your prayers say each dying day?Your healing hands artillery did lay?But did, for you, sometimes the tumult fade,Did agonies relent as words unfold?Recalled within your notebook was peace made;“A little maiden fair / With locks of gold.”?And left you more than she a-weeping and, Before the war fell you for Lady R...?Why never did you let a wedding bandBe-threat the edge of sword Excalibre? I hope you filled life’s chalice to the brim -And that you knew not Haig, but pitied him.
Then April, seventeen; with crimson endWas Canada, enobled nation made - On Vimy Ridge. And afterwards you penned; “The Anxious Dead;” and you were not afraid.Oh Jack McRae, few men were loved as you:Men clung to you as shadows cling to men;Still wear your poppies to hold glorious whoFound glory in a dark beyond their ken.The horse you cherished led your black cortege,Turned boots in stirrup irons to say you’re dead,Men's tears at Wimereux were not of rageBut love for one ashamed to die in bed...And in the going down of every sunSome shall recall your words each one by one.
Called MacUrtsi was each poet to your clan,Goodbye Doctor, MacUrtsi, McRae, Man.

****
IN WOUNDED FIELDS
Epilogue


And so I had my discourse with these poetsAnd with the others from that book Who’d gone to war with heads held high but knew Scant glory in the mud, and died,Yet found their songs and verseIn such a torrent rushedAs might have changed the world
I thought of how wild flowersIn brightest beauty blazeWhere ordure thickest lies - It's stink by glory overpowered.
This place of peace holds very little traceOf what had come to pass those years before.But rust away as may the swordsI shall remember poet’s wordsAnd we shall remember themLong after all the blood and all the bedlam,Long after time has healed the wounded fields.

Bryan Islip
October 96